About ten years ago, I was in the middle of moving several of my teams to Scaled Agile when a former coworker, we’ll call her Jen, invited me to see how her new company was rolling out agile across IT. She’d landed at a large office furniture manufacturer with dozens of engineering and IT teams, and what she showed me stuck with me more than almost anything else I saw that year. They had built a dedicated physical space, what I’ve always called their Agile Factory, designed to run four teams at a time through agile onboarding before sending them back out into the business. The piece of that onboarding I still think about most is something as simple as a team charter.
Most companies treat agile adoption like a training event. A few days of certification, a new Jira board, and everyone is expected to show up agile on Monday. What Jen’s company understood, and what most organizations still miss, is that a team isn’t agile because it learned a vocabulary. It’s agile because it has an identity: a set of norms, values, and a way of resolving conflict that the team itself wrote down and agreed to. Skip that step and a team can point stories and run standups for years without ever becoming a real team.
Four Teams at a Time, Four to Six Weeks Each
The Agile Factory was four agile pods worth of desk space, arranged so team members could sit and work in close proximity. The company knew it couldn’t convert every IT team to agile at once, so instead of a scattered rollout, they built one place to do it right and ran teams through it in waves.
Each team spent four to six weeks there. Certified training, Jira board setup, backlog refinement, story pointing. The Agile Manifesto hung on the wall where everyone could see it, and there were dedicated spaces built for agile events and team collaboration. It wasn’t a two day workshop and a wish of good luck. It was a real curriculum, and it was a visible, expensive signal from leadership about how much they valued getting this right. We built our own Story Pointing Workshop around that same idea: a team calibrates a shared point scale together before it ever touches a sprint, instead of guessing at hours and hoping the estimates hold up.
The Whiteboard That Stuck With Me
The piece I still remember most clearly was the Team Charter board. It was a large whiteboard divided into sections: team norms, conflict resolution, team values. And near the top, a label that caught me off guard the first time I saw it: Team Name.
That one detail said more than anything else in the room. These teams weren’t going to be known as “the data team” or “the infosec team.” They got to choose who they were. Every team that came through went through a Team Charter workshop where they had to define, in their own words, who they were and how they would operate together.
That matters more than it sounds like it should. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman’s model of group development describes teams moving through forming, storming, norming, and performing, and a team only reaches performing once it has resolved its differences and built real trust in how members work together. A team with a revolving door of members, no shared identity, and no defined norms will keep cycling through storming and norming. It will never get to performing, no matter how clean its Jira board looks. We built our own Team Charter Workshop as a direct answer to that whiteboard: a facilitator guide, a charter template, and a PowerPoint to walk your team through defining its own identity, norms, and conflict resolution approach, the same way Jen’s teams did.
How Do You Know If It’s Working
At the end of their time in the Agile Factory, every team was assessed for agile readiness before they moved out of the training pods and back into daily practice. Jen had a real method for this. She looked at the team’s backlog health, its Jira structure, how it pointed stories, how it ran its agile events, and more, and turned all of it into an objective read on where the team actually stood.
Most teams I’ve worked with as an agile coach would not know where to start if you asked them to assess themselves. Scaled Agile’s own guidance on Agile Teams notes that each team member is typically dedicated to a single agile team, and that stable, cross-functional membership is part of what makes a team function well in the first place. Jen’s company measured that directly instead of assuming it. Once a team graduated, it wasn’t left alone forever either. Teams got reassessed periodically and could be pulled back into the training program if the practice slipped. Our own Team Assessment works the same way: a real, scored read on roles clarity, collaboration, delivery consistency, and continuous improvement, not a gut check.
Four teams at a time, on a loop, for as long as it took to raise the whole IT organization. That’s the real story here.
None of this was actually about Jira configuration or running agile events well. Those are outputs, not the underlying work. The real investment was in whether a team had an identity it chose for itself and norms it agreed to before conflict showed up to force the issue. That’s the leading indicator of a high performing team, and it’s usually the first thing organizations skip because it feels softer than a tool rollout.
You probably don’t need a physical Agile Factory, and honestly, most organizations don’t. But it was a clear, expensive signal about how seriously that company’s leadership took team performance. Most organizations never make that kind of investment. That’s exactly why we built free versions of what Jen’s company had. Our resources page has a Team Charter Workshop with a full facilitator guide, template, and PowerPoint, plus agile event and team assessments you can run today to get an objective read on backlog health, Jira setup, and team collaboration, the same kind of measurement Jen used to graduate teams out of the Agile Factory.
So, how are your teams actually doing? Could you measure it if someone asked you right now, or would you be guessing?
If that question made you uncomfortable, that’s worth paying attention to. If this sounds like where your organization is stuck, this is exactly the kind of work we do at Stephens Insight Group.
Talk to us about your transformation